1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to auditing systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to automated employee expense reimbursement auditing.
2. Background Art
One of the most difficult tasks that companies have to face is the management of expense reimbursement to employees. This task is particularly difficult with large companies that can have thousands of employees, each of which can submit several requests for reimbursement on any given day.
Of particular concern is employee expense reimbursement fraud. This type of fraud can be manifest in many different ways. For example, employees may simply submit requests for reimbursement of expenses that did not actually occur. In some cases the expense could be legitimate, but the dollar amount requested could be inflated. In some cases the request could be for reimbursement for expenses that are not reimbursable according to company policy. In these and many other cases the employee, by requesting an improper amount of reimbursement is attempting to defraud his employer.
In other cases, the requests may be for legitimate expenses but could contain violations of company policy. For example, an employee could request reimbursement for a car rental where the rental actually occurred, but the employee violated company policy in the car rental by choosing a non-preferred rental company. In these cases a company may still reimburse the employee, but will want to be able to inform the employee of the violation and track employees that consistently violate company rules.
In an attempt to combat this type of fraudulent behavior and locate instances of company policy violations, many companies have instituted auditing procedures for employee expense entry reimbursements. This typically involves selecting a few requests for reimbursements and having human auditors preform a manual audit of the request. Unfortunately, this is a labor intensive process. As a result, most companies only have the ability to audit a small portion of the reimbursement requests that are made. Thus, most are paid without every being examined for the likelihood of fraud, or for compliance with company rules. This results in a relatively small portion of fraud and policy violations being detected.
Additionally, because of the length of time needed for an expense request to be processed through the system and manually audited, many companies must pay the expense entry before the audit is performed. Thus, even when an audit locates problems it may be too late to easily make the appropriate corrections to the expense request.
Without a method and apparatus to provide automated employee expense account auditing, companies will be unable to effectively audit expense account information to detect the possibility of fraud and compliance with company rules.